Saying “Yes, Lord” as a Way of Life

Dannah Gresh: A woman approached Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth at a Revive Our Hearts recording session. She wanted to thank Nancy, not for what she had taught that day, but for how Nancy had responded to some difficult coaching. Now decades later, Nancy reflects on that interaction.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: That was a powerful moment for me, because I realized, “Not only am I teaching the Word, but the Word is shaping me.” And the most important aspect of my ministry may not be the words I say, whether it’s one program or two programs. 

That stuff is relatively inconsequential, compared to, “Are we submitting ourselves to the counsel and the instruction of the Word?”

Dannah: Welcome to the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for September 1, 2021. I’m Dannah Gresh.

You’ve heard it many times before: It’s often not what you say but your attitude or your non-verbals or your way of life that communicates the most loudly. In other words, walking the walk is as important as talking the talk! Today we’ll hear how God brought that lesson home to Nancy in the early days of this program.

This Friday will be our twentieth anniversary, and we’re taking some time to thank God for what He’s done in and through Revive Our Hearts over the years. 

To help us do that, Bob Lepine traveled to our Michigan studio and did some reminiscing with Nancy. As you’re about to hear, Bob has been a great friend and coach to Nancy over the years. So it’s appropriate—and a great privilege—to have him join us today. Let’s listen to this conversation between Bob Lepine and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Bob Lepine: So, Revive Our Hearts aired for the first time on Labor Day, an appropriate birthing day, because it had been a long labor. We started recording that year in January. And it was September when the first program was aired. 

Nancy: On my birthday, as well. This is helpful to me so I don’t forget Revive Our Hearts anniversaries and birthdays. We just put it all on September 3.

Inauguration Day: It’s Monday, September 3, and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Today marks the inauguration day for a new facet of Nancy’s ministry. It’s this daily radio program called Revive Our Hearts.

It’s a joy for me to be along on day one and have an opportunity to introduce you to Nancy Leigh DeMoss! Nancy, welcome to your own program!

Nancy: Well, this is a very exciting day, and the Lord has, in so many ways, been preparing all of us for this day. 

Bob: This was September 3, 2001 . . . and eight days later we were all stunned by what happened in New York and Washington—9/11. 

Montage of Commentators: 

“That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers . . .”

“There is smoke billowing out of one of the World Trade Center [towers] . . .” 

“. . . an explosion inside . . .” 

“Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack . . .”

“This is a huge explosion! We can see . . .” 

“A second plane now has crashed into the other tower.” 

“There was a cascade of sparks and fire . . .”

“People are running up the street . . .”

Bob: It was one of those things. Here we had just launched something and then . . .

Nancy: For the first thirty days, nobody was listening to us!

Bob: The national focus was elsewhere for all of us, our focus was elsewhere. And in the early days of a radio program, you’re hoping to find new listeners. I know there were people who had listened for years to Elisabeth Elliot. In some cases, you were now in the time slot where her program Gateway to Joy had been aired.

A lot of these people were grieving the fact that a woman who had been their surrogate mother . . .

Nancy: . . . up until the end of August . . .

Bob: . . . was now gone. They didn’t know you. You’ve talked to some of these women who have said, “I don’t know if I can . . .”

Nancy: Some of these former Gateway To Joy listeners said, “I was mad at you!”

Bob: Yes, right! But over time, it was not your winsomeness, but the power of God’s Word that began to work in their hearts and lives. And they began to say, “This is what I counted on Elisabeth Elliot for, her wisdom of what the Scriptures teach. You are providing the same ‘meal,’ maybe prepared with a little different herbs and spices, but it’s the same meal.”

Nancy: And here’s another sweet providence of that month. Now that we’re more established, if something like that happens [a national tragedy, etc.], we’re in a position where we can pivot and do some replacement programming that’s timed to what’s happening.

In those days we weren’t in a place to do that; we were trying to keep our heads above water just to keep programs on the air. But in God’s providence, the first series we recorded and aired was a series on“Finding God in the Desert.”

Dannah: In fact, we have a recording of that very first teaching series. Let’s listen to some of what people heard on that historic day in 2001. 

Nancy from “Finding God in the Desert”: Why would God allow or even design desert experiences for His children? As we go back into the history of the children of Israel in the Old Testament and see some of their desert experiences, we get some insights into why God allows us to go into the deserts.

The most obvious point that comes out in the Old Testament book of Exodus as we read about the Israelites in the desert is that God wants to test us. Do you remember when you went to school, when the teacher wanted to find out if you had learned the material that she had taught, what did the teacher do? She gave a test.

Sometimes it was a pop quiz, sometimes it was a final examination, but what was the purpose of the test? To find out if you had really learned the material! And God uses these desert experiences to test us. 

We read in Exodus chapter 15 that when the children of Israel were in the desert of Shur that the Lord made a decree and a law for them, and there in that desert He tested them.

And then we see them in Exodus 16:4 in the next desert. The Scripture says, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘[In this desert] in this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions.’”

And then we come to Exodus 20, and they’re in the desert of Sinai, the wilderness. In verse 20 Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you.” You see this same point in Deuteronomy 8:2 where Moses is recounting for the people now forty years later as they’re getting ready to leave the desert and go into the Promised Land. Moses is reviewing their history and reminding them why God allowed them to go through the desert all those years. He says, 

Remember how the LORD Your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years [don’t forget, it was God who was leading] to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commands.

God tests His children! And what is He testing? What is He trying to find out? What is He trying to show us? Well, this testing reveals first what is really in our hearts. Now, God knows what is in our hearts, but often we think we know what’s in our hearts, and God wants to bring to the surface who we really are.

What we really are comes out in the desert. It comes out under pressure. Anybody can be spiritual and act spiritual and talk spiritual when they’ve got money in the bank, when they’ve got good health, when their husband adores them, when their children are perfectly obedient, and when they’re happy! Anybody can act spiritual then!

But what’s really in our hearts comes out when we go through these desert experiences, when we are tested and tempted, and when it’s hard and difficult. So God wants to reveal to us what is really in our hearts. That’s a test. He wants to test us and see, will we be obedient?

God wanted to see, would they keep His commands? Will we be obedient when we can’t see the outcome of our obedience? When it looks like it’s going to lead us into a worse situation? Will we be obedient when God’s ways do not make sense to our human minds? Will we be obedient when God’s ways don’t seem to be working?

Will we be obedient when we cannot see God and when we don’t have anyone else that we can turn to for help? When we don’t have anywhere else we can go, when we don’t have any other means of getting our needs met? Will we be obedient? Will we say, “Yes, Lord. I will obey You”? That’s a test.

So God tests us to reveal what’s in our hearts. He tests us to see if we be obedient? And He tests us to find out, will we trust Him? Will we trust Him when we don’t know the outcome? You see, God took away things from the children of Israel: food, water, basic things in life. The Scripture says God caused them to go hungry.

Why did He do that? To see if they were trusting Him or if they were trusting themselves and their own resources. He wanted to see if they were trusting Him because of who He was or because of what He was doing for them and what He would give to them. He wanted to find out when they were just stripped and exposed, would they trust in Him?

So God sends us into the desert to test us. And then, God sends us into the desert to humble us. We read this in Deuteronomy 8, again where Moses is telling the purposes of God. In verse 3 He says, “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna.” 

He humbled them. As I was meditating on this passage last week, I thought back to their time in Egypt. I thought, Hadn’t they already been humbled enough? They had been slaves labor for Pharaoh; they had had a rough life in Egypt! Hadn’t they already been humbled enough? Apparently not.

You see, God knew that there were other areas where they needed to be humbled in order for God to fulfill His purposes in and through them. God wanted to reveal His grace to them. But what kind of person does God give grace to? To the humble! (see James 4:6) To those who have humble hearts, to those who recognize God’s greatness and their own limitations and weakness. So God sends us into the desert not only to test us, but also to humble us. 

And then God sends us into the desert for another reason, and that is to teach us total reliance upon Himself. In fact, we read that in Deuteronomy chapter 8, as we continue in verse 3, “God humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” 

God wanted to teach the children of Israel that they could not rely on themselves. He wanted to strip them of reliance on themselves or on others.

You remember that the children of Israel, when they began to complain and whine in the desert about the lack of food, the lack of meat, at one point they said, “When we were back in Egypt, we had plenty of food to eat!” You know why? Pharaoh fed his slaves. They were dependent on Pharaoh for their provision, for their food in Egypt. 

But God wanted to show them that there was no human being that ultimately they could count on to meet their needs. He wanted to strip them of reliance on anything of themselves or of others. I think of that passage in 2 Corinthians chapter 1:8–9, where Paul was talking about the hardships that he had to endure in going to all these different places and taking the gospel. 

He said that the hardships we endured in Asia happened to us so that “we might not rely on ourselves but on God.” 

Someone has said that, “You’ll never know that God is all you need until He is all you have. And once He is all that you have, you’ll find out that He really is all that you need!” 

So God wants to teach us to rely upon Him and to strip us from relying on ourselves or on others. There’s a glory in that; there’s a beauty in that; there’s a richness in that. That’s really the end of all of life! 

God knows exactly how long and through what circumstances He will bring us to that point of where we’re just stripped of reliance on ourselves or others and totally cast upon the Lord to depend upon Him.

Nancy (today): It wasn’t recorded in light of 9/11 by any means, but in God’s providence, what was on the air around that time was perfectly suited to help minister grace to people as they were struggling to process what was going on.

And we’ve seen that happen many times. We’ve seen it happen when a program that we air (or re-air some years later) comes into somebody’s path. They hear the program right while they’re smack-dab in the middle of a circumstance that that program is addressing. 

They write us saying, “This was exactly what I needed to hear!” How did God know that? How does He do that? He does. 

Bob: In those “toddler years” of the ministry, and really from the launch of Revive Our Hearts in 2001 until what I would say are the “elementary years” (that’s when we started doing live events), we would get together from time to time—not only at the recording sessions, but we’d pull back and do some planning and thinking.

We had to evaluate funding issues—was the Lord going to raise up the funding necessary for the ministry to sustain itself? We had to look at staffing issues, because the needs were great.

Nancy: We still look at all those things. We still have those meetings.

Bob: In those early days, though, we would think, Would we ever have a staff of twelve . . . or twenty? Today you’ve got close to a hundred people working for Revive Our Hearts. Would we ever be able to get to a budget that was, I think early on, a million-and-a-half dollars?

Nancy: That was huge!

Bob: Yes, it seemed like a mountain that was more than we could climb. And yet, God has raised up many of the folks who are listening to us today, who have been financial supporters . . .

Nancy: . . . ministry partners, yes. 

Bob: And every time we would have one of those meetings, it almost felt like, “Okay, are we going to make it?” And every time we would take the next step, and God would meet us! In fact, you talked about God’s provision of grace when you need the grace. 

We can often look ahead and start planning and thinking. We can be overwhelmed by what’s on the horizon because we don’t have the grace for the horizon as we’re looking at it. The grace is there when you get to the horizon, not when you look at it.

We would often talk as you were getting ready to record a program . . . You’d call the night before and say, “I don’t have it ready!” And I would say, “Tomorrow we will step to the Red Sea. You will have to put your foot in. Then let’s watch and see what happens!”

Nancy: We often felt like we were at the Red Sea.

Bob: Yes! 

Nancy: With the Egyptians breathing down our necks and water in front of us and mountains on the side and an army behind us! God often used you—as well as others on our board and on our team—to just remind me of the faithfulness of God. Now we have so many of those stories!

But there are still moments when I say, “I feel like I’m at the Red Sea! I can’t meet this writing deadline!” . . . this problem or that problem that we don’t know how to solve, but You do. You step forward, you’re crying out to the Lord, and the Lord is saying, “Stand still. I’m going to show you My salvation.”

And then when it’s time to put your foot in the water, the waters part, and God walks you through! I’m thinking about those early days when I was so stretched! (I’m still stretched! But that’s also because I’m older!) But I’d be wondering like, “How is this going to be pulled off?” Bob, you were such an asset, such a help and a coach.

I remember the first interview I ever recorded, we did at the studios of FamilyLife. Nobody would have ever known this when it aired . . . but . . . There was the guest, here was me, and there was you. You weren’t going to be on the air, but you were saying, “Now, ask her this.” And then I would “ask her this,” and she would answer it.

Nancy (recording of her first on-air interview): So now you’re a teenager . . .

Bob (in background, to Nancy): Okay, hang on now, before you do that, make a turn here and let us exhort . . . “And I would hope moms today would catch a vision for that.” Go ahead and instruct a little bit.

Nancy (today): And then you would say, “Now, ask her this.” Sometimes I had to write down what you were saying, because you’re way more verbal than I am. I need those notes! 

Bob (in background, to Nancy): “When you talked with your parents . . .” ask her that. “What was their response when you talked about . . .” You need to ask that question.

Nancy: “Had you talked with your parents about your . . .?”

Nancy (today): I remember sometime after that interview (interestingly, shortly after it aired) that I was in Chicago at Moody and I saw Pastor Erwin Lutzer. I ran into him. He said, “I heard that interview you did with so-and-so last week.” Then we had a conversation about it. He didn’t know all those things you were saying to me on the side.

I remember asking you years later as we reflected on that, “Bob, tell the truth. Did you ever think, I don’t think this is going to work. I don’t think Nancy is going to make it.”

Bob: Well, we’ve laughed about the one studio moment. I don’t know how many of our listeners knew about it. It was in the first month of recording where you were in the middle of a message, and I just sensed you were distracted. 

Nancy: Or struggling and couldn’t pull it together. Maybe I was exhausted, because I had been working half the night to prepare.

Bob: Yes, could be. In the middle of that I just felt impressed to pray.

Nancy: But you didn’t just pray! You’re sitting in the back corner of the room (it’s not that big a room). I look over and there is Bob Lepine on his knees, kneeling at his chair, praying! I’m thinking, This must be really bad!

Bob: And yet, God met us in those moments and provided. There was another recording session that we’ve talked about before where you got done with your recording, and I did not realize what I was asking you to do when I asked you to do it. 

But I said, “I think you had two programs that you kind of compressed into one there. I think we did not get everything we needed to get out of that.” So I said, “Would you mind going back and re-recording and making that into two programs? Make program one about this idea and program two about this second idea.”

Nancy: Exactly. And I choked.

Bob: And you said, “Give me thirty minutes.”

Nancy: My memory is that it was like maybe three minutes! 

Bob: Okay, well we took a few. 

Nancy: But what I do remember is that the women in the room saw the look in my eyes, and one of the women said, “I think maybe we should just pray for Nancy right now! 

So they prayed, and I looked at my notes, and we did re-record. You were totally right; it was a great call. I recently sent you an email we got from a woman who heard those programs that we re-aired recently many years later. She’s now listening to it for the first time, and it upended her life!

She was writing to tell how transformational those two programs had been to her, here in 2021. I sent it to you and I said, “Do you remember? These were the programs.”

Bob: And in that moment, I remember as well, somebody talked to you later who was in the room that day who was taken aback by what she saw as kind of a heavy-handed direction from me to you. Who was I to come to you and say, “You need to do this again”?

Nancy: And, of course you weren’t heavy-handed. But what made it particularly poignant was that one of those programs, this was in the series on the book of Ruth, was about women being open to receive the counsel and the wisdom of godly men and that we shouldn’t be too proud to do that.

And so, I taught on that. She came up to me afterwards (I think it was her first time being in one of those recording sessions), and she said, “The most impacting moment for me today was how you responded when Bob asked you to do that retake. I knew it was hard, but you modeled what you taught in that program.”

That was a powerful moment for me, because I realized, “Not only am I teaching the Word, but the Word is shaping me.” And the most important aspect of my ministry may not be the words I say, whether it’s one program or two programs. 

That stuff is relatively inconsequential compared to, “Are we submitting ourselves (men and women) to the counsel and the instruction of the Word?”

I would not want anybody to think you were heavy-handed, because you were far from that! And, Bob, I remember you sat in virtually every recording day we had those first two years. You had a full-time job at FamilyLife!

What would happen was, I would record all day Monday, and then you would pull me aside afterwards. We’d take, I don’t know, twenty minutes, and you’d coach me. You’d tell me what had gone well, what you thought really worked. Then you’d just give tips or tweaks.

Then I would go home and try to work that into the sessions I was going to teach the next day. So it was hard, but it was invaluable. I have thanked the Lord so many times for the gift it was to have a coach who was not trying to make me like somebody else, but who was trying to help me develop into the best possible person I could be in this medium.

I remember, when I went back to doing conferences after a lot of this input, it impacted my speaking in a positive way, and my writing has been impacted. A woman came up to me who hadn’t heard me speak at a conference since years before radio. She said, “What happened to you?! You’ve changed!” 

Well, we’re all growing. We’re learning. And you were such a key piece . . .and also the support of your precious wife Mary Ann, who would never come to this mic to have this conversation. She wasn’t on the front lines, but she was behind the scenes supporting, encouraging, getting me out of my little condo there to walk.

Bob: You would walk for a mile or two a day. 

Nancy: Yes we did, and I would talk through what I was thinking of teaching. She would talk, too, but when I had something heavy on my heart, I would share it. I wanted to see if it made sense. She would listen to that. She would give ideas, and we would pray together. 

This whole thing has been such a team effort: the staff at FamilyLife, the staff at Back to the Bible years ago who provided services to help us get off the ground, the staff at Life Action Ministries . . . and now, this amazing team at Revive Our Hearts—a number of whom came from those other ministries as other ministries shared their staff with us. Many of those are still here today.

So, it’s been a team undertaking. At times when we thought, We can’t do this!, God provided what we needed and who we needed. You were a key player in that, and I couldn’t be more grateful!

Bob: Well, I’ve said to you and to others many times: As I look back on what I’ve been allowed to do in ministry over the course of the years that I’ve done it, many things have been a privilege beyond what I ever imagined—serving at FamilyLife for twenty-eight-plus years on-air . . . all that I got to do there, really a great privilege.

But I look back, I say it’s the providence of God, to have me in the audience to hear you, to plant a seed, to see God water that and bring it to fruition, to be a part of helping to encourage and provide counsel for this ministry, and to see what God has done in it and through it in the lives of women who have been impacted. It’s one of the great privileges of my life.

I sometimes wonder . . . When we get to heaven, I think there may be some opportunity for sorting out and seeing things that we have no idea what we did, how God used it in some way. It may be a passing comment that we didn’t even know we made, and how it impacted somebody’s life.

I don’t know that there are ledgers in heaven, but I’ve wondered if just the small part I’ve played in the work of Revive Our Hearts, if in God’s counting, it’s like that matters more than many of the other things I’ve been involved with, just because of the fruitfulness of this ministry in the lives of so many women.

I run into women all the time who will say, “I was in Chattanooga at the True Woman event that you hosted,” or “I was here.” Or they associate me because of the years that I emceed events for Revive Our Hearts; they know of my connection with it. It’s been a blessing for Mary Ann and me to be cheerleaders, to be encouragers, and supporters—financial supporters—of the ministry. 

Nancy: Yes. And you have served on our Advisory Board from the beginning, for all of these twenty years! We have terms, but we’ve never let your term expire! And you’ve been willing to keep doing it!

Bob: We’ve been happy to extend that. Again, it’s been a great privilege. We’re so grateful for your obedience, your faithfulness, how God has used that in the lives of so many, and to have played a small part in the lives of women and husbands, marriages transformed, families reshaped because of the investment of this ministry. It’s really been a great privilege.

Dannah: Well, that’s Bob Lepine, whom you may recognize from his many years with our partner ministry, FamilyLife Today. Bob has been talking to Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth about the many ways we can look back and see God’s faithfulness in and through the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. 

We leave our “teen years” behind and turn twenty the day after tomorrow! Many of our listeners have been calling and helping us celebrate. We heard from Ro, who’s originally from the United States, but currently is living in Taiwan. 

Ro: I just want to share about meekness because recently Revive Our Hearts—at the beginning of July—has done a program on meekness. 

Dannah: Nancy’s series, “The Beauty of Meekness,” really resonated with Ro.

Nancy (from “The Beauty of Meekness”): There are times when the pathway of meekness is just to “shut up,” to say nothing, to be silent, to be still, to let God come to our defense and not to defend ourselves.

Ro: I started listening to these episodes on meekness every single day when I was jogging or exercising . . . and I've been listening to them over and over again. 

Dannah: Ro found herself in a difficult living arrangement where she suddenly had to move out, but God used Nancy’s series on meekness to help her respond graciously to the woman who asked her to move.

Ro: He helped me to remember the words about meekness. I just remember when I was emailing her back, praying, “Lord, how can You help me to be a blessing to this person, even though they're not being very fair to me and they're not giving You much time?” 

He even convicted me to change my email in a way that was unique, because I remembered listening to Nancy talk about how we can display a lack of meekness through email. 

Nancy (from “The Beauty of Meekness”): How quick and easy it is—too easy—to press “send.” Email can be a place where we really demonstrate a lack of meekness. Learn to wait to press “send” until you’ve stopped and thought, Is this really what God wants me to say?

Ro: It was amazing! The Lord provided a house to live in, a place that was even better and closer than before to the ministry that I wanted to be in. I think the biggest thing that was such a blessing was, the lady I had been living with was really lonely, and when I was dropping off the keys the last day, she told me, “Thank you for your kind email. I actually really miss you now. And yeah, I really appreciate your kindness towards the end.”

She was appreciative of it. I thought that was so cool! It's so funny, because later I realized that my Chinese name, which I'm using on this program, is actually the Chinese word “Wun-Ro,” which actually means “meekness.”

And I just thought that was so cool because I thought that wasn't a thing that I ever was. I was so far from meek! So yeah, I'm really thankful for this program being here. I'm going to continue to listen to this over and over again because meekness is something that I'm sure the Lord is going to be using my entire life to change me.

I'm never going to achieve it here on this side of heaven, but I hope that one day the Lord will fully make me as meek as He has given me a name to be! Thank you so much for your program, and I hope that you all have a blessed day

Dannah: I love that! Oh, thank you, Ro, and isn’t it cool to hear how God uses His Word in our lives to change us into what we need to be: more like Jesus?

If you’d like to share how the Lord has used Nancy or Revive Our Hearts in your life, call our testimony line and leave us a message. The testimony call-in line number is 269–697–6161. If you get a busy signal, just wait a little and try again later. 

One of the core messages of Revive Our Hearts over the years has been what it means for us to bring glory to God as women (and as men). We live in a time where there’s a lot of confusion on what it means and doesn’t mean to be a woman. 

That’s a topic Mary Kassian and Nancy tackle in their classic Bible study True Woman 101: Divine Design. During the month of September, we want to send you a copy of that study as our thank you for your donation of any amount to support Revive Our Hearts. You can go through it on your own or with a group of friends. 

To make your donation, visit ReviveOurHearts.com or call us at 1–800–569–5959. Ask for True Woman 101 when you contact us to make your gift.

And speaking of True Woman, something pretty significant in the history of Revive Our Hearts happened in 2008: True Woman ’08, our first True Woman conference. Many lives were affected by that event. Bob Lepine and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will talk about that tomorrow. I hope you’ll be back for Revive Our Hearts.

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